17 May 2004

Employees Are Close to the Breaking Point

From an article in workforce magazine:
"We’ve reached a breaking point," says Tony Lee, editor in chief of CareerJournal.com, an executive career site published by the Wall Street Journal, about companies pushing workers to be more productive, especially when they don’t see the extra sweat end up in their paychecks. Corporate profits continue to rise, and workers aren’t getting their fair share, experts say. A study put out in March by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, titled "The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation: Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003," tells the story. It found that corporate profits accounted for nearly 41 percent of the change in national income between the first quarter of 2002 and the fourth quarter of last year. That exceeded the share employees got in their paychecks. "In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income, and at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation," the report states.